Main Page Proposal

You are allowed to edit pages but we are anoyed at the number of people who are changing the pages to rude, Obnoxious sentences are we are getting increasingly annoyed and will block your IP address.

?? Who is this comment directed at? Cormaggio 15:35, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

This proposed page is already outdated the list of languages is incorrect, and does not include the corrections and comments that were added to the current list, displayed as a table sorted by code and by compliance of these codes with standards. Verdy p 13:28, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Deletion

I'd like to propose Test-wp/Skandinavisk and subpages for deletion; there is no such thing as a unified Scandinavian language, not even an artificial one. It was never a serious proposal, just a test to see if it might have worked (which it obviously didn't). Therefore I propose its deletion. Jon Harald Søby 19:20, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps a simple deletion requests page should be made rather than risk losing such suggestions on this portal. Angela 06:16, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Scope of this wiki

What is the scope for this wiki? Specifically, my question is: is this wiki only for test Wikipedias, or is it intended to allow for development of some new Wikimedia projects, as was proposed in m:Seed wiki and m:Wikikernel? Cheers. Cormaggio 15:35, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

I still have some questions at meta:Talk:Wikilabs. It might be a good idea to look at scratchpad.wikia.com for what to expect from such a project. That one's been running for the last 18 months and there haven't been many good wikis that have come out of it so far. Angela 16:39, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

What is a "test Wikipedias". I Doubt this whole wiki is a sandbox. Would i get blocked If i replaced a lot of pages with the word "test"?--Yskyflyer 03:47, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Is this is a Test to make a wikipidias in new languages?--Yskyflyer 03:49, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I started (or restarted) the proposal for something like this at m:Wikikernel, and I attempted to answer from one perspective some of the issues raised by Angela by trying to formalize some of the policies that might be used to start up a new "project" that would be hosted here by the project incubator. I for one don't think that every crazy proposal can or ought to be hosted by an incubator simply because it is possible. On the other hand, the standard for acceptance should be quite a bit less than that needed to become a full Wikimedia sister project.

Ideally, this would have been a wonderful place to put something like b:Wikijunior or b:Wikiversity. Such proposals certainly are well on their way to becoming independent sister projects, and that sort of standard should apply. If you see m:Wikikernel/Policies, there are some suggested policies that might have some influence on what happens here. Please, don't turn this project into a giant sandbox that essentially turns this into a free webhosting service with very low quality content. I would imagine that is one of the problems with the scratchpad wikia. --Robert Horning 21:39, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Logo

Will Wikipedia Incubator have its own logo? —Nightstallion(?) 06:00, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I think that the Incubator is available for all projects and its server url is //incubator.wikimedia.org, and a seperate logo should be used instead of Wikipedia logo. --Shinjiman 07:27, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I concur. Who's gonna do it? Maybe we should simply make an open call for logos on meta -- would anyone be against that? —Nightstallion(?) 10:16, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Redirect

Lingua Franca Nova

For the past few months the language Lingua Franca Nova has been preparing for its own Wikipedia here, and besides pages not Wikipedia-related (into to the language, translations that would belong on Wikisource etc.) there are about 200+ articles. We decided to do this after seeing how links work on a test wiki, how one has to pipe the wikilinks which makes for a lot more work. I'm assuming that a test wiki hosted on another server in this manner would be sufficient but I thought I would make sure just in case. We're not going to apply for a Wikipedia though until we have most or all of the articles that every wikipedia should have, so we'll probably apply in September or so with somewhere around 1,000. I guess the only question then is whether anyone sees any problems with this approach? If so it would be good to know ahead of time. Mithridates 15:53, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

It sounds fine. Very responsible of you (as opposed to some 'proper' Wikipedias which only have 10 articles. I don't know about the technical aspects, but I doubt there would be a problem. -User:Dbmag9

Name

Shouldn't this project's name be "WikiMedia Incubator" instead of "WikiPedia ..."? I thought it was meant for all kinds of proposed projects, not just Wikipedia language editions? —Nightstallion(?) 20:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it should be Wikimedia, not Wikipedia. New language versions of projects like Wikibooks should be just as welcome here as new versions of Wikipedia. Angela 05:38, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism by Woynabot?

This Woynabot "user" renamed a user home page into the article space without respecting the naming conventions that separate the projects and user pages, and renamed the discussion page as well.

Working in the Incubator will rapidly evolve to havoc if naming conventions are not respected between the various namespaces, and this will be even worse if the user namespace redirects to the article space with unrelated names!

I'm not sure if Woynabot is the same user as the user whose page was renamed. Could an admin verify the IPs?
I note that the page moves occured after a vandalism was reported to the renamed user. So I suspect that "Woynabot" is just an account created to ignore the sanction taken against the reported vandal IP! If this is the case, then an admin should assist the user whose account pages were abusively renamed!

Why is that possible to rename a user page (in the "user:" or "talk:" namespaces) into the main article namespace? This should be forbidden!

I don't think that it is possible; you can set what language you would like them to appear in in your preferences, but I don't know if you can edit what you want them to be (someone familiar with the MediaWiki software can correct me on that). If I were you I would go to Special:Allmessages (the place where all the system messages are listed) and copy/paste the table onto a page in your test. Then users can translate the messages there, and once you have a domain you can easily implement the changes. Dbmag9 00:24, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

On the menu «Special» go to «System Messages». There you can find all system message including the buttons, but you need admin status. Etienne 0:25, 17 september 2006 (CEST)

Why those totally redundant prefixes "Test-WP"?

Why do you use those totally redundant prefixes "Test-WP/"? This whole wiki is an incubator (like the URL says ;-), so why those surplus prefixes. Just do not copy them! Just use the language codes as proper prefixes. You could even make namespaces just out of the lang codes (e.g.: "bar:Hauptsaitn", etc. ("bar" or "Bar" would be the namespace prefix, etc.) --84.156.127.161 01:18, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

It is not absolutely redundant, as you can create not just test Wikipedias, but also test Wikisources and so on. But as long as there is only one test wiki for a language (and mostly this is a Wikipedia), there is no need for an additional prefix, that's right. If it's a Wikibook or so, there is still the possibility to give it a proper prefix (if necessary). But in most cases a language has to be proven as "worth" only once, I think (and hope ;-). --- MfG, Melancholie 01:57, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Ah, making prefixes out of the language code is not a good idea, as this will make a test wiki unusable when the actual wiki and so an interlanguage link prefix for that wiki is set up. Then all links would disappear on this wiki, and would link directly to the actual wiki. Maybe this has something good, but it would just corrupt this nice wiki, so a prefix like "Wikipedia/bar/", "Wikiversity/ar/", etc. would be the best. I recommend the "/" end, because like this you can get navigation links at the top! --- Best regards, Melancholie 03:48, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to get rid of these prefixes this week (I'm on holiday after it), but there are several possibilities of naming it:

/test-wp/ to /Wikipedia/ (and so on; e.g. /Wikipedia/Bar/123) - this was the original idea, but the /Wikipedia/ prefix is even longer than /test-wp/ and I think it'd be exhausting to type that all the time

/test-wp/ to /wp/ (and so on; e.g. /test-wp/Bar/123) - that is my idea, and as such, I like it :) capitalization problems (wp or WP) and the 'ugliness' of it could be reasons to dislike it, though

/test-wp/ to / (e.g. /Bar/123) - I don't like this proposal, because there might be (for example) both test Wikisource and Wikinews for a language - in that case it'd be completely messy.

What's your opinion, which one would you choose - or do you have other ideas? — Timichal • 06:07, 27. Jun 2006

Namespaces would work better than subpages, but perhaps neither are needed if each page is categorised instead. For example, Category:Bar should be on all pages in that language. Angela 06:18, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, categories are needed to sort the articles; though I think each language could have its own category tree (for easier moving to their own subdomain) - but all the language's categories should be in, Category:Language. There was an idea to drop even the languages prefixes (e.g. /test-wp/bar/123 becomes 123), but I don't think it's a good idea at all - there are some article names which would be the same in several languages (for example Wikipedia) and I don't think we could handle the conflicts. — Timichal • 06:30, 27. Jun 2006

I like the middle proposal (/test-wp/ to /wp/). It is succinct, yet gives all the necessary information and allows for multiple project tests in one language. Dbmag9 19:52, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Getting rid of redundant prefixes

Since there hasn't been any serious objections or improvement ideas for the Why those totally redundant prefixes "Test-WP"? thread, I'm going to get rid of these prefixes soon - so that /test-wp/lang/article becomes /lang/article (but I can change that if you have other ideas). In the proccess I'm going to get rid of leftover redirects, fix the links and correct the possible ISO language name inconsistencies. It should be done within 30 hours or so.

Note that I will not start just now, but first wait for some time for possible opinions or ideas for other kind of prefixes, so please post them here if you have some. I'll also try to talk to Angela about it before I start. Thanks!

Update - I'm away for two weeks, so this is open to suggestions (or you can start the move by your own ;) ) — Timichal • 18:17, 28. Jun 2006

Maybe, better have no prefix at all? This is easier and more understandable. Possible conflicts can be solved, for example, by using prefix only in case of conflict, and [[|]] construction in the article. Categories are better way for show in what language is the article, as Angela had already said. --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 03:04, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, /ISO/article name is what I'm planning to do. As for the no-prefix-at-all idea: I don't think it's a good thing, for two reasons: first, the conflicts (using the prefix only in case of conflict is, I think, impossible to do - who knows how many such conflicts will occur? and, the naming convention won't be unified and might confuse newcomers); second, the moving (the developers could move wikis to their own subdomains, and they - I think - need to have an easy way to check which articles need to be moved from Incubator - and that way is having prefixes). Categories: I'm in favor of having a category tree for each incubator language, so projects, when they get their own subdomain, will already have a consistent category system and won't need to edit every article to change categories. — Timichal • 03:00, 30. Jun 2006

What about the project type? If there's a Wikipedia and a Wikisource test in a language, there needs to be a differentiation. I suggest type/language/pagename, for example wp/en/Main Page if the English Wikipedia was being tested here. What do you mean by a category tree? Dbmag9 11:36, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

That was my original idea, and I'm still not decided whether to use language/name or type/language/name - the latter is a bit longer and probably useless in most of the cases here (that is, most of the testing projects here are Wikipedias). Maybe we can have Wikipedia by "default", i.e. "en/Main page" for English Wikipedia, but "ws/en/Main page" for English Wikisource? — Timichal • 12:24, 17. Jul 2006

But that raises a similar issue to the above suggestion of only prefixing in conflict. Plus, it looks very inelegant (in a mathematical sort of way). Dbmag9 20:45, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

My suggestion is this:

New languages go in the form project/language/pagename.

English Wikipedia (Main Page)

wp/en/Main Page

New projects go in the form project/pagename.

Wikiscope (Main Page)

wikiscope/Main Page

We assume that a new project will not be in multiple languages, and will have a unique name. Users will have to be vigilant in preserving the capitalisation.

Notice that in all cases everything other than the page name is in lowercase. This should be preserved at all times, to avoid getting conflicts and confusions like we have with 'Test-WP', 'Test-wp', 'Test-Wp', 'test-WP', 'test-wp', 'test-Wp', 'TEST-WP', 'TEST-wp' and 'TEST-Wp'. Dbmag9 09:59, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Commons images

Hello, as you perhaps noticed, I started deleting images on the Incubator and adding their equivalents from commons:Wikimedia Commons. (If you don't know what Wikimedia Commons is and how to use it, please read its FAQ). I'd like to encourage you to use images from Commons, because it has several benefits:

A majority of images uploaded to Incubator are fair-use only - they can't be used commercially and have several usage restrictions. There is a possibility that Wikimedia's policy about these images will change and such images would have to be deleted. However, all the images on Commons are free-licensed - this means you can safely use them on your project and you wouldn't have to remove them if the policy changes.

The images from Wikimedia Commons can be easily included in any Wikimedia project, so when your language gets its own subdomain, you won't have to change anything - the images will still be at Commons and the links will work.

Last but not least, it's a relief for incubator, because we won't have to delete all the images after your project gets its own subdomain.

Some wikis have turned off local uploads. What do you think about doing that here. It means all free images go to Commons and fair use images wouldn't be allowed at all. I think it makes a lot of sense to disallow fair use here since there are not enough people around to police that the images are really allowable. Angela 02:42, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I would object to turning off local uploads if this incubator project is to include things other than strictly test Wikipedias. The primary issue is dealing with fair-use images, and there are projects such as Wikinews that not only can use them, but it is required. Other Wikimedia projects including several Wikipedia language versions (notably en.wikipedia) and most of the other projects have fair-use in one form or another.

I understand the reason why Commons decided to exclude fair-use images, and that is reasonable. Perhaps that debate should happen here.

By far, the best fair-use policy that is "enforced" that I've seen is on the Italian Wikipedia (w:it:Aiuto:Copyright immagini). It was primarily from this policy that I helped draft the fair-use policy on Wikibooks (b:en:WB:FUP). I think these are reasonable standards and if fair-use is permitted, this should be the typical restriction placed on it. Note that the Wikibooks fair-use policy includes guidelines for textual fair-use as well.

As far as policing the content here, I would be willing to volunteer, and I would argue that there will eventually be a community here that can do that sort of policing that will be necessary. What is primarily needed is enforcement of markup-tags, and perhaps a formal policy that only fair-use images can be uploaded locally. And even then, it must fit within the restrictions of a strict policy and be marked up for what kind of "excemption" is justified for its use as fair-use. Wikinews is doing this now, and has been very successful at culling images that don't comply. I am suggesting that if it is enforced, the number of images to monitor will also be correspondingly low as the criteria for allowed images here would be quite narrow. --Robert Horning 13:55, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Categories

There's been talk of having a category system to show which pages belong to which language and project. I can imagine that this might be useful. Perhaps have, for each language, a template wp-en}} (for English Wikipedia) which adds the page to the category [[Category:English]] and [[Category:Wikipedia]]. This might be good once transferal is made, for automatic moving.
Dbmag9 11:44, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

And this is exactly what we have already do in Siberian wikipedia. --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 15:06, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Being Bold and establishing New Project Policies

It is about time that some new policies are established for this project, regarding the creation of new incubator projects. I would like to get some public comment before they are added, but I am asking if meta:Wikikernel/Policies should be adopted here as a formal policy. I would like to get some public discussion about this matter, but if there are no serious comments about this, I'm going to start modifying pages to make this a formal policy for this project. Reasonable comments are welcome, and these policies are certainly not going to be "written in stone" as unammendable policies either. This is just a way to get started.

In addition, we need to get it "official" that this is going to be for more than just new test Wikipedias. If this is a true Wikimedia incubator wiki, the front page needs to reflect that fact. I would like to have a "design competition" to see some visions of how to make the front page much more inviting than what it currently is. If this is just going to be for test Wikipedias (not even test Wikibooks or Wiktionaries), the current front page is fine, I guess. I personally think it is ugly and should be changed. --Robert Horning 17:32, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

I think that looks reasonably fine. If we put it up at Incubator:Policy, we can discuss it. It is "official" that this is for more than just Wikipedias. Feel free to change the Main Page to reflect that. Dbmag9 13:44, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

New Project Set-up

While I was starting to make a replacement for m:Proposals for new projects a whole set of questions came to mind which we need to sort out before they become problems.

On Meta, there is a system for new project proposing by which people make a page just about their project, they read a page just about new project policy, and then list their proposal on a page just for that. There is a category filled with project proposals. There is even a place to list ideas which you don't want to take responsibility for.

However, Incubator is for testing new projects and languages, not for providing a place for them to be discussed. We want to move away from Meta as much as possible (communicating between two projects is often awkward), but at the same time we don't want to clutter up our space with hundreds of project proposal pages.

It may be that I am exagerating the problem, but I feel that we need to address this before there is a confusion. Dbmag9 20:42, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

English Wikipedia Template

I've just spent about 20 minutes adding the Incubator template to every language article with an associated test here. It looks like the box witch tells people that there is a wikipedia in that language, but it says test instead. It only works for prefixes in lowercase (Test-wp rather than Test-WP), and I've only added it in english articles which already exist. There is a bit of confusion (in some cases it seems that there is already a real Wikipedia, or there are multiple prefixes for one language). In future please add it when you start a new test. Dbmag9 21:20, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Incubator!?

..... Seems the SITENAME variable of the [[:incubator:]] is still using Wikipedia Incubator, is that need to send a mail to the developers to tell the change of the SITENAME variable? --Shinjiman 15:51, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Coincidentally, I put up a request to change that about an hour ago on Bugzilla. Thanks for bringing it up, though. Dbmag9 16:24, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

bugzilla:06874 – "Set {{SITENAME}} of the Incubator to Wikimedia Incubator"

I'll be around when I'm on the computer. Dbmag9 15:29, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Do you think we should put this in the Sitenotice? The English Wikinews has always had a prominent link to their IRC channel and I expect that makes the channel a lot more active. Angela 19:02, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Interestingly most of the major Romance languages (Italian, French and Portuguese, all of which were requested either directly to ambassadors or at the respective embassies) remain absent - a Tagalog-speaking Philippino provided the Spanish. Nov ialiste 18:35, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

A bunch of new real wikipedias have just been created, Novial included! See here for Novial:

Multilingual project

I also want to invite everybody to participate in a multilingual translation project. The goal is to translate many sentences, illustrating common grammatical rules, for the maximum possible number of languages, so it will be a textbook of every language in the world.

And you can see links to lesson 2 and lesson 3 at the end of page. We are trying to write one new lesson a day. This is an opportunity to teach all the world your favourite language. --Yaroslav Zolotaryov 12:42, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Imports done

I've transferred all the articles and history from here to the relevant new Wikipedias. Note that I compiled the transfer lists by prefix, not by category. In case anyone's interested, the script used for the transfer is here.

It's now up to you whether you delete these articles from incubator or just archive them. They will take up the same amount of storage space either way, the only difference is visibility. Personally, I would lean towards archiving, but like I say, it's up to the community. -- Tim Starling 01:08, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, is there any particular reason to lean towards archiving? My first thought was to delete them, as they are all viewable on the new Wikipedias and deleting them ensures that nobody edits the archives here by mistake. However, I would be interested in hearing your opinion. Dbmag9 13:32, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Templates

If I create a template named like this Template:Wp/crh/template_name, will it work, and will it be moved to the new crh (Crimean Tatar) wikipedia after it will be created? Alessandro 12:16, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

The first question (will it work) is simple; yes. Using {{Wp/crh/template name}} will allow it to work normally. The second question (will it be moved, or should it be made there) is harder, as decisions have not yet been made about whether to prefix templates. There are a huge number of non-prefixed templates around, however it makes more sense to me to have the template prefixed. Hopefully a decision will be made soon, and we shall come up with a good system. Dbmag9 13:30, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Request/Question about announcing new projects

Centralized location Is there a single page on this project that announces new projects (other than MediaWiki:Created possibly?) If not, can one be made, so it can be added to my watchlist? Thanks. Koavf 17:09, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean new languages, such as a Siberian Wikipedia, or new projects, such as Wikiversity? If it is the former, there is not yet a proper system but when there is there will undoubtably be a listing of newly created languages. If you mean the latter there will usually be a great amount of discussion at Meta before a new project is created. I hope that helps. Dbmag9 21:51, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Finnish wikispecies

How can i start a finnish wikispecies project? --62.236.100.238 16:27, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikispecies is not language-based; there will only ever be one. In theory there should be no language-specific text on the content pages at all. Leave a message on the community portal there if you want to try and attract more Finnish speakers to it. Dbmag9 11:45, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Use of no-latin text

To enable use of no-latin alphabet, I would like to update MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning2 which is protected. I have updated the MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning which is seems to be non active. I would like to hear your openion on this before asking administrators to help on this. Cheers 17:00, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Helping

I'd like to help with administrative work here on Incubator; what can I do? —Nightstallion(?) 11:03, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I assume that you mean something other than editing test articles; in that case the first thing that occurs to me is tagging non-prefixed articles and trying to move them to the right place. I'm sure that there are a multitude of other things on top of this; I'll leave a note here if I think of them. Thanks! Dbmag9 16:26, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

And where would I find those unprefixed articles? Is there some kind of category or Special page for them? —Nightstallion(?) 17:32, 2 November 2006 (UTC)